The transcultural Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector described writing as “miraculous fishing”, using the “word as bait,” casting for “something beyond the word”, for meaning “between the lines” that then “assimilates the word”. In reflexive chronicles tensed between documentary retrospection and digressive rumination, she also points out the paradoxes that “writing often means remembering what has never existed” and that the writer’s digressive dissembling may discover “brutal truths.” I hope the lines I cast as scholarly and creative writer have such a slant; likewise, the lines I sketch and sculpt.
My visual art, like her verbal art, is caught between cultures and tangled in past present. Though some of my cultural moorings are in modern Brazil, my point of departure is Lisbon, a stretch of towns along the Tagus and on Portugal’s vicentine coast. My first artistic references stretch back through the public squares and shantytowns, graffiti and posters of the post-revolutionary Portugal of my childhood, Salazarist modernist monuments and a ubiquitous Manueline Baroque with its global artistic influences (exploited styles and expropriated works that enriched my education creatively, informed it critically), layered traces of medieval, moorish, roman, celtic imaginaries in urban and rural landscapes. I have spent much of a lifetime studying in other sites (classical, rennaissance, modern, contemporary art around the Mediterranean, in northern and eastern Europe and Russia, the US, Lusofone Africa) and returning again to these. I sink my charcoal and oil lines, hooks baited with stone and cast in bronze, along invisible portulan-like networks of intercultural memory, navigating transatlantic cultural tides. Aside from commissioned work and constant color, formal and figurative studies, mostly, my sketches and sculpture draw traces of sunken cultural imaginaries to the surface, net sense from migrating shoals of cultural symbols, sustain me (and I hope others at sea), and accrue as ballast in the hold as I attempt to critically and creatively remap and reorient my own cultural consciousness and conscience. Like my scholarly work, my art work aims for a humane and humanizing, critical and creative attentiveness and insight informed by displacement, defamiliarization, deterritorialization of discourses, and dialogue. My art tries to find sense in a sort of space on the margins and between the lines, through figures tensed within frameworks constructed from symbolic abstraction and material traces, objects reframed as landscapes and abstracted color studies, landscapes and bodies reimagined as memory maps, mixed media (oil and charcoal, wood and wax, welded metal and stretched painted or imprinted cloth, wire and found objects). Several of my current lines of sketches, sculpture, and photography cast for a cultural compass using fish as subject or bait: critically documenting and creatively depicting a fishing industry and fish in a Portuguese cultural imaginary confronting climate change, global capitalist markets, and troubling colonial memory and waves of post-colonial nostalgia. Other lines of my work cast for sense by retracing scars, reconfiguring memory as living map drawn on the body, recovering discarded and disregarded fragments, reframing landscapes and lives lived within them. I care deeply about form and frame, creative and critical framework, line, color, texture, material, always the subject and site, story and history inseparable from the way we tell, touch, see it.
What might be framed as a realist strain in my work includes documentary photographs taken in Portugal, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, as well as pencil and watercolor portraits, more gestural charcoal and clay or bronze cast figure sketches. My figurative oil and charcoal sketches as well as sculpture draw on continuous figure drawing sessions and stacks of sketchbooks that are my way of seeing on the road, but also on my own photographs, archival photographs, propaganda, as well as scholarly study of literature, cinema, art, architecture, cartography, etc. Some of my photographs reframe fish as markers of cultural memory but also as current way of reckoning with climate and market shifts, a manifestation of various currents in cultural consciousness. The boy I sketched fishing on the Aveiro shore struggles in clay and bronze with an imaginary sea monster modeled after a fish on a dry fountain. My Portulan map, in bronze, exposes the coin as compass and explores the ways in which colonialism resurfaces on the contorted geo-cultural body. The fishmonger photographed holding her glasses and old women drawn in conversation offer us intimate glimpses of impenetrable subjects, whose lives extend within and beyond site and sight. Yet all of these realist works also strains towards the abstraction more evident in my conceptual oil and charcoal sketches. I see my figures framed by abstraction and my abstract works that cannot be figured out as akin to my documentary work, insofar as they document the lines and tensions, shapes and colors of a struggle (my own and others’) with a post-colonial cultural imaginary. I mean to weave lines with which which story and history, fiction and documentary, critical and creative work in verbal and visual arts cast for understanding into a wide net with a transcultural reach, more effective at letting fish through to live, strong enough to hold a sustaining and sustainable catch.